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@xlarry256 · 2026-10-13 03:28

Columbus Day: Why Does America Honor a Man Who Never Set Foot in America? Today is Columbus Day. The practical part first: post offices and most banks are closed, federal offices are shut, but the stock market is open, and supermarkets and delivery services run as usual. Schools vary by district. Now the strange part. Columbus never set foot in what is today the mainland United States. In four voyages across the Atlantic, he reached the Bahamas, Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica, Central America and the South American coast. The closest he ever came was Puerto Rico in 1493 — US territory today, but back then just one more Caribbean island. When the United States was founded, Columbus had already been dead for 270 years. So why does a Genoese sailor who worked for Spain get an American federal holiday? The answer has very little to do with Columbus. It has everything to do with the Italians who arrived in America four centuries later. First, Columbus himself, briefly: born in Genoa in 1451, a weaver's son who became a self-taught sailor. He was convinced sailing west would reach Asia — and his math was wrong: he shrank the Earth by nearly a quarter. Portugal turned him down; Spain made him wait seven years before signing in 1492. Three ships, about 90 men, landfall in the Bahamas on October 12. He brought back gold and the news of a "new world," proved to be a disastrous governor, was shipped home in chains in 1500, and died in 1506 still unsure of what he had found. The turn came at the end of the 19th century. Between the 1880s and the 1920s, roughly four million Italians immigrated to the United States — one of the largest migration waves in American history. They were poor, Catholic, Italian-speaking, and widely discriminated against. An immigrant group fighting for a place in a new country needs one thing above all: proof that "we belonged here from the beginning." Columbus was that proof. He was Italian (though Italy was not yet a country), Catholic, and — in America's official story — the man who opened the Americas to Europe. Italian Americans could say: the first page of the American story has one of ours on it. A few dates show how deliberate this was. In 1882, the Knights of Columbus was founded — a Catholic organization that chose Columbus as its patron precisely to declare that Catholics and immigrants were patriotic Americans, and it later became the driving force behind the holiday. In 1891, after a New Orleans jury acquitted Italian immigrants accused of killing the city's police chief, a mob stormed the jail and lynched 11 Italians — one of the largest mass lynchings in US history. Italy broke off diplomatic relations; Washington paid an indemnity. The next year, President Harrison proclaimed a national celebration of the 400th anniversary of Columbus's voyage — part commemoration, part message to Italian Americans: your ancestor is an American hero, not a criminal. After decades of lobbying by Italian-American groups and the Knights, Colorado made Columbus Day a state holiday in 1907; it became a federal holiday in 1937; and since 1971 it has fallen on the second Monday of October. Today. So Columbus Day was never really about a landing in 1492. It is the result of an immigrant community spending half a century writing its own ancestor into America's founding story, in exchange for one official sentence: we are Americans, too. That is also why it is argued about now. For Italian Americans, the day carries their grandparents' dignity. For Native Americans, 1492 marks the beginning of disease, enslavement and lost land — which is why at least 17 states and Washington, DC now mark Indigenous Peoples' Day instead of, or alongside, Columbus Day. Both sides are arguing about the same question, and it is not really about a sailor from Genoa: it is about whom this country chooses to remember. One last fact to keep for today: of America's 11 federal holidays, Columbus Day is the only one honoring a man who never set foot on US soil and never worked for this country for a single day. He holds that place not because of where he went — but because four million immigrants needed him there.

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